From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "Stephen C. Tweedie" MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <14301.15443.303167.898233@dukat.scot.redhat.com> Date: Mon, 13 Sep 1999 19:02:59 +0100 (BST) Subject: Re: bdflush defaults bugreport In-Reply-To: References: Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: Rik van Riel Cc: Linux MM , Stephen Tweedie List-ID: Hi, On Sun, 5 Sep 1999 09:58:56 +0200 (CEST), Rik van Riel said: > yesterday evening I've seen a 32MB machine failing to install because > mke2fs was killed due to memory shortage -- memory shortage due to > a too large number of dirty blocks (max 40% by default). In the past, such problems were mainly due to the refile_buffer() code not limiting the write rate of heavy buffer cache writes more than anything else. > Lowering the number to 1% solved all problems, so I guess we should > lower the number in the kernel to something like 10%, which should > be _more_ than enough since the page cache can now be dirty too... That is not a clean solution: it's just imposing an unnecessary performance on the whole cache when the problem probably lies elsewhere. > Btw, the problem happened on a 2.2.10 machine In 2.2, the page cache cannot be dirty in this sense. --Stephen -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://humbolt.geo.uu.nl/Linux-MM/